Saturday, February 11, 2012

I've spent the last week in SDL's office in Amsterdam with some of the Tridion masters (including Alvin Reyes and Mihai Cadariu) for some knowledge transfer from R&D regarding our soon-to-be-launched re-vamped, re-thought, re-designed and re-super-improved SiteEdit 2012.

As typically happens in this type of Knowledge Transfer, the information flow always goes both ways - we learn from R&D on what the tool is expected to do while showing back to R&D how we expect it to behave under the blueprint abuse that we constantly put Tridion through.

And while it was clear that the tool is still in development (a couple of buttons were not enabled yet on the build we used) it was also clear that what is in place really works amazingly well.

I really don't even know where to start when it comes to SiteEdit, there's just so much being added and/or modified that it's hard to start.

So I'll start with the simple improvements I've seen.

Defining Page Types (a prototype from which you can create a new page) is as simple as checking a box on _any_ existing page.

Adding an image to Tridion's "content library" is as simple as dragging & dropping it into your existing library

SessionPreview architecture shows changes to pages dynamically without the need to republish the page or any of component presentations (and avoiding any publishing queue bottleneck).

The whole wording of this interface is much user-friendlier than Tridion's language in general, which tends to be very technical - Content instead of Components, "Edit everywhere" instead of "Edit parent"

Ability to associate component templates with page templates - so that users will only see the options that make sense to use in any given page - and present these to the user as "Content Types"

Well, there's just so much! So, why don't I shut up and let some pictures speak a few thousand words?

Editing a "shared" component:

Selecting a page type for a new page:

Editing Content:

Selecting an image from the library:

Absolutely amazing and surprisingly stable and fast. Can't wait for it to come out.